Blog Post

Chrome new UI release and random password generator

After celebrating Chrome’s ten-year anniversary on Sunday, Google released today version 69 of the Chrome browser, one of the most feature-rich versions in recent years.

With today’s release, Chrome now joins Mozilla and Microsoft as browser makers who completely redesigned their browsers.

Firefox went through two major UI updates with the Aurora and Quantum releases, Microsoft replaced Internet Explorer with the lighter Edge, and, today, Google gave Chrome its first major facelift since its release in 2008.

This new user interface is easy to spot because it uses a predominantly white color tone along with rounded tabs, a big shift from Chrome’s regular grayish UI with angled tabs.

Chrome says the new UI is better fitted for mobile devices, but the jury is still out with desktop users, some of whom have been grumbling for the past few months ever since Google started testing the new design back in late April. Nonetheless, the backlash hasn’t been even close to same levels of animosity Mozilla faced when it released its Aurora interface redesign back in the early 2010s.

While Google didn’t make a big deal about it like it has in previous years when it redesigned a product, this new UI is also much more in sync with Google’s Material Design design language.

For the past two years, Google has slowly redesigned Chrome’s settings panels with a Material Design look, but with today’s release, the Material Design look has irrevocably seeped into the main browser interface as well.

But besides the unignorable new UI, Google engineers also have other surprises for Chrome 69 users.

The one that’s most impressive, at least on the security front, is Chrome’s new built-in random password generator.

Every time users will focus their cursor inside a password field, Google will generate a random password and offer it to the user. If the user chooses to use it, Chrome will automatically save it in its password store. But be advised, users must be logged into a Google account to use this new Chrome feature.